The eastern half of the US completely missed the winter of 1889-1890, while the Pacific Northwest had one of their coldest winters on record.

Romm and McKibben would have explained this familiar pattern as being due to chicken farts. The pattern is almost identical to this past winter. Hansen of course would say that this type of weather was impossible prior to 1988.

The winter of 1890/91 was remarkable for its long duration, from 25th November to 22nd January, rather than for the intensity of the frost, though December 1890 was the coldest such-named month in the CET record (q.v.)
During this period (last week of November to third week of January), the average temperature was below 0 degC over nearly the whole of England and Wales and below (minus) 1 degC in East Anglia and the south-east Midlands

It’s amazing to see full-scale maps for those months, even with large-scale omissions. The mildness in the Eastern United States – I have always assumed generated by Foehn winds off those huge Californian storms – is wonderfully striking.

It was a hot summer here in Melbourne – no doubt a powerful monsoon with drenching rain in Queensland and New South Wales was a factor, but we had 11 days with maxima over 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) in January. That figure was exceeded only once in the twentieth century in the record hot month of January 1908 with six days over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) – a heatwave followed by Melbourne’s coldest winter on record.